The Giant Chasm

Unprofessional

It has long been hinted that New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern was a sandwich short of a picnic.  She talks a big game.  She has talked up all the wonderful things her administration was doing when it came to controlling the border.  Sadly, neither she nor her colleagues could hide forever the failures.  

Here is an excerpt from Stuff.

The Revelations About the Border Botch-ups

Given the importance of the borders, and making sure that those coming into the country don’t cause community transmission, the Government has been making promises for the last two months that every worker employed in relation to the border would be routinely tested. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Health, and the Director-General of Health have continued to reassure the public that such testing was being carried out.

The media have pressured the Government over these promises, with many journalists attempting to verify that routine testing was in fact taking place. Newshub’s Michael Morrah then broke the news ten days ago, that the system wasn’t working at all.  (Emphasis, ours.)

This news has been met with exasperation. The Herald’s Derek Cheng, who had been asking the government for details of the testing for three weeks without reply, said the revelation went against what the Government had been saying was necessary and being done. He pointed out that “A quick glance at Melbourne is all you need to see what’s at stake here.”

Elaborating further, Cheng explained that the lack of testing is an ongoing problem that the Government should have learnt from already. He points to controversies in June when “people staying in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities were meant to be tested on day three and on day 12 of their stay. It wasn’t happening, we later learned, because the ministry was still putting it in place. Daily health checks were also not done properly on two Covid-infected sisters, one of whom had symptoms”. He asks: “why is there – still – a giant chasm between what the Government says is happening and what the ministry is doing?”

Left Hand Ignorant of Right Hand's Deeds

Unco-ordinated Confusion 

International Flights Continue to Bring 100,000 Unchecked Travellers a Week to Britain

Oliver J J Lane
Breitbart London

Despite introducing severe lockdown on its own residents, the UK government has not enacted any incoming travel restrictions, leaving over 100,000 arrivals a week free to enter the country unscreened, the health secretary revealed.

Asked by UK television host — and self-proclaimed “friend” of U.S. President Donald Trump — Piers Morgan on how many people were being tested for coronavirus as they stepped off international flights arriving in the nation’s airports, health secretary Matt Hancock revealed there was no routine testing at Britain’s air borders going on at all.

Following up that admission with the number of people still arriving in the United Kingdom by air, despite much of the global flying industry working at minimum capacity, Mr Hancock said around 15,000 people a day were landing, reports London’s Times.

While this number is a fraction of the number of people normally arriving in the United Kingdom — Heathrow, the country’s largest airport, would typically see an aircraft land or take off every 45 seconds and 213,000 people move through it a day — it still means a significant 105,000 people coming to Britain every week without a health check. [Emphasis, ours.]

Using And Abusing the Poor For Political Gain

James Dobson On the Border Wall

Media is not 'truthful' in reporting on migrant detention centers

By Samuel Smith,
The Christian Post


As the Trump administration faces condemnation this week in response to reports of inhumane conditions for migrant children held at overcrowded border detention centers, conservative evangelical leader James Dobson said the media has not been “truthful” in its reporting on the issue.

Dobson, a psychologist who founded Family Talk Radio and Focus on the Family, sent his July newsletter to thousands of friends and supporters to share his firsthand account of what he saw at an immigration detention center in McAllen, Texas.

As conservative evangelical leaders have been kept informally engaged in various aspects of the Trump administration, the 83-year-old said he was invited on the trip several weeks ago by the White House as federal agents “are struggling to deal with a massive influx of poor and destitute human beings.”

Dobson, who served on the Trump 2016 campaign's evangelical advisery board, said he promised U.S. Custom and Border Patrol agents that he would “go home and tell as many people as possible what I had seen ‘up close and personal.’  Please believe me when I tell you that the media and leftist politicians have not been truthful about what is going on there,” Dobson stressed. “It is a human tragedy.”

He said that about 5,500 people arrive every day in districts organized along the U.S. border with Mexico. According to Dobson, McAllen is the “busiest and most besieged” of all the districts.   “The ‘refugees’ arrive exhausted and ragged from walking hundreds of miles. Among them are large numbers of children, many of whom are unaccompanied by a caring adult. Last year, 382,000 aliens were apprehended for illegally crossing into this country and almost 100,000 of them were minors,” Dobson explained.

Merkel's Attempt to Expunge Guilt Over the Past Is Failing

German Government Teetering on Collapse

Merkel’s Immigration Policies Rile Coalition Partners

The Blaze

Angela Merkel’s government is teetering on collapse as the German chancellor spars with her coalition partners over policies on immigration and asylum seekers.

What is happening?

The coalition between Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Bavarian Christian Social Union is split over the latter’s new proposal to limit asylum seekers at the country’s borders, Fox News reported.

In 2015, Merkel began an “open door” policy for migrants that allowed about 1 million refugees into the country. The migration has slowed over the past two years, but Germany still receives about 11,000 new asylum-seekers each month, the report states.

Merkel, regarded by some as “the most powerful woman in the world and de facto leader of the European Union,” is facing opposition from the Alternative for Germany, a right-leaning group. The AfD became the third-largest party in Germany after the 2017 federal election.

Horst Seehofer, the CSU interior minister, whose party is facing regional elections in October, is calling for Germany to turn away refugees who have also registered in other European countries. Also, Seehofer supports blocking asylum-seekers whose applications were previously rejected by Germany.

The Dislocations of the EU on Britain's Labour Market

Another Brexit Bonus?

Unrestricted migration has caused huge strains in UK society.  It has been one of the major failures of EU ideology.

We live in a time when people are mobile.  Labour was once seen as fixed--in location, or nation.  Capital, on the other hand, was mobile.  If labour were too expensive or in short supply, a business could move its capital offshore to jurisdictions where labour was more plentiful and less expensive.  It could set up its business in another country relatively easily.  But moving the entire work force to another country was almost impossible.

But now things have changed somewhat.  Labour (at least for the moment) is far more mobile than it used to be.  What this has meant is that migrants (often operating off a very low cost base) have been able to enter Britain and take jobs which otherwise British people would have taken.  The end result has been under-utilization of British labour, and an over-utilization of (cheaper, more mobile) migrant labour.  In this sense, business has never had it so good.  It has not had to move its plant and capital offshore (thereby saving costs); it could stay exactly where it was, and employ cheap migrant labour.  Consequently it is reaping the benefits of moving to an offshore, lower-cost labour market, without actually moving an inch.

As many of four million Brits cannot get a job or the work they would like because they are forced to compete with a “virtually unlimited pool” of migrant workers from the European Union (EU), a report has said.

North Koreans May Copy the East German Precedent

When Citizens Face Imprisoning Fences

There are a few examples in recent history of nation-states ceasing to exist almost overnight.  One of these is East Germany.  On one occasion, whilst gingerly feeling its way forward, East Germany opened its borders to West Germany for a day.  The authorities expected that a few East Germans would wander across, look around out of curiosity, and return to the East.  Some indeed did the sight-seeing trip.  But thousands crossed the border that day and did not return.  It was the end of the new beginning.  The German Democratic Republic itself was in its death throes.  And everybody knew it. 

A significant component of this event was that citizens on both sides of the border viewed themselves fundamentally as Germans.  It was their racial, ethnic identity.  We are now confronted with another possible people led re-unification--namely, Korea.  There are several salient similarities with the case of people-led German re-unification.  The ethnic, racial, cultural and historical ties that link the two as one are an example.  Both North and South view themselves as Koreans.

There is lots that we do not know.  But by all accounts the state of life and the suffering of the common people in North Korea is atrocious.  Meanwhile, over the border, down south, there is a rapidly modernising, peaceful, prosperous Asian Tiger.

The North Korean regime is typical of totalitarian dictatorships.  It long ago lost touch with reality and can no longer distinguish reality from propaganda.